Search results for ""Author Margaretta M. Lovell""

The impulse in much nineteenth-century American painting and culture was to describe nature as a wilderness on which the young nation might freely inscribe its future: the United States as a virgin land, that is, unploughed, unfenced, and unpainted. Insofar as it exhibited evidence of a past, its traces pointed to a geologic or cosmic past, not a human one. The work of the New England artist Fitz H. Lane, however, was decidedly different.In this important study, Margaretta Markle Lovell singles out the more modestly scaled, explicitly inhabited landscapes of Fitz H. Lane and investigates the patrons who supported his career, with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about their land, their economy, their history, and their links with widely disparate global communities. Lane’s works depict nature as productive and allied in partnership with humans to create a sustainable, balanced political economy. What emerges from this close look at Lane’s New England is a picture not of a “virgin wilderness” but of a land deeply resonant with its former uses—and a human history that incorporates, rather than excludes, Native Americans as shapers of land and as agents in that history.Calling attention to unexplored dimensions of nineteenth-century painting, Painting the Inhabited Landscape is a major intervention in the scholarship on American art of the period, examining how that body of work commented on American culture and informs our understanding of canon formation.

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Focusing on the rich heritage of art-making in the eighteenth century, this lushly illustrated book positions both well-known painters and unknown artisans within the framework of their economic lives, their families, and the geographies through which they moved as they created notable careers and memorable objects. In considering both painting and decorative arts simultaneously, Art in a Season of Revolution departs from standard practice and resituates painters as artisans. Moreover, it gives equal play to the lives of the makers and the lives of the objects, to studying both within the interdependent social and economic webs linking local and distant populations of workers, theorists, suppliers, and patrons throughout the mercantile Atlantic. Emphasizing maritime settlements such as Salem, Newport, and Boston and viewing them within the larger framework of the Atlantic world, Margaretta Lovell considers the ways eighteenth-century New England experience was conditioned by its source cultures and markets. Colonial material culture participated in a nonsubsistence international economy, deriving ideas, pigments, and conventions from abroad, and reexporting them in the effort to enlarge market opportunities or to establish artistic reputations in distant London. Exploring these and other key aspects of the aesthetic and social dimensions of the cultural landscape, Lovell concentrates on a cluster of central issues: the relevance of aesthetic production to social hierarchies; the nature and conditions of artisan career trajectories; the role of replication, imitation, and originality in the creation and marketing of art products; and the constituent elements of individual identity for the makers, for the patrons who were their subjects, and for the creations that were their objects. Art in a Season of Revolution illuminates the participation of pictures, objects, and makers in their cultures. It invites historians to look at the material world as a source of evidence in their pursuit of even very abstract concerns such as the nature of virtue, the uses of identity, and the experience of time. Arguing in favor of a more complex approach to research at the nexus of aesthetic and ideological concerns, this provocative new book challenges established frameworks for understanding the production of art in British America during the tumultuous decades bracketing the Revolution.

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In this volume, scholars from various disciplines show how physical objects can expand our comprehension of how people lived, worked, and thought during the colonial and early national periods. Inspired by the “material turn” that introduced the legibility of objects across humanities disciplines, the essays in this collection show how “reading” material objects from sites such as Monticello, Salem, and the Connecticut River Valley brings to light significant dimensions of social experience and cultural practices that are not visible in the written record of early America. Reading objects for evidence of the lives and values of the individuals and groups that imagined, fabricated, bought, and used them, the contributors examine the migration of items such as chairs, fashionable dressing tables, portraits, and even natural relics. In doing so, they uncover complex economic, ethical, and mnemonic issues; investigate the political life of seemingly unpolitical things such as a rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts; and consider the environmental riches and extraction industries behind early American prosperity and ingenuity.Together, these essays demonstrate the value of attending closely to visual and material culture, as objects can be derided or cherished as proxies for people and ideas. A Material World will interest both academics and enthusiasts of visual and material culture, as well as anyone interested in life and society in early America.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Paul G. E. Clemens, Edward S. Cooke Jr., Stephen G. Hague, Patricia Johnston, Laura C. Keim, Ellen G. Miles, Emily A. Murphy, Nancy Siegel, Carol Eaton Soltis, and Jennifer Van Horn.

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